Since the operating expense is crucial to the increasingly popular cloud gaming
services, server consolidation is one of the key technologies for the success
of these services. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments using real
GPUs and a complete cloud gaming platform to answer the following question:
Are modern GPUs ready for cloud gaming? Our experiment results show that
modern GPUs have low consolidation overhead, and are powerful enough to
concurrently support multiple GPU-intensive cloud games. For example, when
using our cloud gaming platform, the recent NVidia K2 GPU outperforms NVidia
Quadro 6000 by up to 3.46 times in FPS (frame per second). Moreover, our experiments
lead to two new findings that are counter to common beliefs. First, with the
latest GPU virtualization technique, shared GPUs may run faster than dedicated
GPUs. Second, more context switches not necessarily lead to lower FPS.
Last, our experiments shed some light on further
enhancements of cloud gaming platforms. For example, offloading the software video
codec to the GPUs will result in better gaming experience, which is one of our
future tasks.